[opyate]

> He said you shouldn't expect games to be fun when you first get them working. He described making Deus Ex, and said they spent years on the game and the first time they played it it wasn't fun at all. He thinks you shouldn't worry about that, and just make something with content in it and then make it fun to play at the end of the process.

This seems to go counter to modern practices, which is to not bother with content at all at the start, and to "find the fun" in a gray box level first.

[barrkel]

I think it's the opposite of Sid Meier's approach, which is to play early and often, keep the fun parts and chuck the rest.

https://www.retrogamer.net/profiles/developer/sid-meier/

> From a game design perspective, we established an iterative process in which we create a basic prototype that’s fun to play, even without exciting graphics and fully implemented features. We have a system, we play and then improve, then again we play and improve, but this is done throughout the development process. We keep what works and get rid of what doesn’t. This approach ensures that we remain focused on the gameplay experience every step of the way and deliver a fun game.

[wsc981]

I think that’s also Jonathan Blow’s approach in a way.

Figure out a fun mechanic and build a game around it. He even had a talk where he discussed several game prototypes that had mechanics he initially thought could be fun, but after implementing weren’t great so moved on to different projects [0].

———

[0]: https://youtu.be/ISutk1mauPM

[djur]

I've seen Spector tell this story a few times, and the point as I understood it was that the team was shocked and dismayed to realize that the game they'd worked on so hard wasn't fun. They ended up tossing out big chunks of their original design document in order to make the changes necessary to make it fun. The lesson was "don't let your grand plans distract you from making a fun game", not "don't worry about making a fun game, focus on your grand plans".

[somat]

The two are not mutually exclusive. Your "thing" may not be great when you first start out, but it is important to get content out and see if you can make it fun.

Deus ex is sort of that way. In deus ex it is the conversation engine. It was the first thing they made and is really the mechanic around which the game is built.